The present invention relates to an inkjet printer.
An example of inkjet printers that jet a plurality of inks to a recording medium to perform recording is disclosed in Patent Document 1 (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-125635). In this inkjet printer, inks are stored in their respective ink reservoirs from ink cartridges as ink supply sources through ink supply tubes, and are supplied from a plurality of ink outlets provided in the ink reservoirs to a plurality of nozzles of the recording head. Since there are cases where nozzles of the recording head are clogged because of mixture of air in the ink or thickening of the ink remaining in the recording head and the clogging affects the jetting quality, a maintenance operation such as a suction restoration operation of sucking ink from the nozzles is performed to restore ink jetting by eliminating the clogging of the nozzles.
In recent years, the number of nozzles of recording heads has been increased in order to increase the printing speed and the resolution. In the second embodiment of Patent Document 1, two recording heads are juxtaposed, and as shown in FIG. 12, the ink reservoirs supplying ink to the recording heads each have two ink outlets. In such a structure, there are cases where for a specific ink, two ink outlets of the same ink are necessarily disposed apart from each other because of the layout, and ink is continuous in the two ink outlets (in Patent Document 1, the ink outlets 41c for yellow ink are disposed apart from each other). In Patent Document 2 (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. H11-254701) and Patent Document 3 (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-181846), a plurality of recording heads are provided to perform printing on both ways of the reciprocating scanning of the recording heads, and in order that no difference in color is caused at the time of the reciprocating scanning of the recording heads, the two recording heads supplying ink from the same ink tank are disposed apart from each other in a mirror-image relation and ink is jetted from each nozzle.